Moorepark Memoir
So the Geelong* Writing Club puts out an annual anthology and recently put the call out for next edition, and the theme this time is... the hardest theme of all ...open topic. ::cue picture of Edvard Munch's the Scream:: *Geelong being my nearest large town. Submissions may be poetry, flash fiction, short story, and memoir. The flash fiction ( Read more... )
My boss, the farm owner, if I may be so bold as to conjure an Australian legend, reminded me of Steve Irwin -- he had the same short boxy stature, the same exuberance, except in this case rather than for animals and conservation his enthusiasm was entirely directed toward profitably growing vegetables, and everything he'd say was peppered with the most shockingly profane analogies. I'd give you an example dear reader but you'd be unable to sleep for the next three days trying to work out if it were anatomically possible. Despite being one of the largest vegetable growers in the Bundaberg area, I have never seen him wear shoes. I generally got along with him fine, but he had this unnerving propensity to appear like an unholy genie the moment anything went wrong despite his properties being spread over thirty kilometers. Someone rear ends my work ute? Oh there's Trevor coming around the corner. Ute gets stuck in the mud in a paddock, oh look Trevor is just coming along.
Current construction suggests (or can suggest; it does to me, anyway) that "farm owner" is an Australian legend, which makes hitting the name "Steve Irwin" a bit of a hiccup. This slight rearrangement of clauses feels more natural to me:
If I may be so bold as to conjure an Australian legend, my boss, the farm owner, reminded me of Steve Irwin-
You could probably do away with "my boss"; since we know you're working on the farm, it's kind of understood that the farm owner would be your boss.
Despite being one of the largest vegetable growers in the Bundaberg area, I have never seen him wear shoes.
Technically a dangling participle (construction implies that you, not Trevor, are one of the largest vegetable growers in the Bundaberg area). One possible fix:
Even though Trevor was one of the largest vegetable growers in the Bundaberg area, I had never seen him wear shoes.
Another editor might quibble over the use of "largest" as it suggests that Trevor the person is like some physical titan or something; fair point, I guess, but the line to draw between legitimate ambiguity and a Miss Thistlebottom's hobgoblin is a tough one. (The same can be said for the dangling participle I mentioned above.)
A tropical storm (ex-cyclone ozwald) rolled through, amd for three days I could do nothing but watch the pounding rain on the windows, and the road in front of my house flowing like a river. Listening to the news I learned the entire area was flooding; in Bundaberg the water was over the roof of the grocery store, and 17 helicopters worked overnight to evacuate 7000 people from roofs. My seaside community of Moorpark Beach had become an island. Then the power went out and I had no more news, just rising water around me. Quite disconcertingly, in the middle of the night I was jarred awake by my smoke alarm going off, but it was merely because the battery had died. When I finally awoke to a beautiful sunny morning I called Trevor to see how things were going but he informed me the water was still then rising around his house and he was at the moment standing waist deep in it trying to rescue what he could, and sure enough, despite the sunny weather the water continued to rise over the next three days, and all we could do on the now-island of Moorpark Beach was stroll around and collect coconuts on the beach, since the ocean itself had become contaminated with all the outflow.
To me this is jarring-the rest of the piece has been about the general state of your life there so far, and the beginning of that initial sentence makes it sound somewhat casual. I would recast it as:
When ex-cyclone Ozwald rolled through, for three days...
to more clearly signal that the event is unique, and to lift the reader from the daily habits of the job to this one specific time/event. Given how the smoke alarm figures in the next part of the story, it might be worth mentioning what you did with the smoke alarm (since you didn't have any batteries for it but also needed to stop the beeping!).
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